24 ms·

Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work

1061 points by jdhendrickson 5y ago

I just wanted to share an experience as a warning to fellow users of hacker news and in the hope that somehow someway 7 years and countless hours can be recovered. I've never posted anything like this, but this is the only place I have any hope of a human response after youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company. My wife started a company that helps people transition from colleges in their home country (for instance the IIT system in India) by translating their credit system into the American educational credit system. She utilized a youtube channel with unlisted videos to explain to internal employees the nuances of difficult evaluation types, for instance how to determine for CEGEPs in Quebec the difference between upper secondary and post secondary. Another example would be how to award credits for MBBS programs from U.K modeled educational system (West Africa, India etc). Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. These videos were unlisted and literally contained only incredibly dense, rather boring videos covering the nooks and crannies of various educational systems and how they relate to each other. When she responded, she received an auto reply that stated you get a reply within 2 business days. No further response despite repeated requests within the system, then tweets, and finally submitting a new appeal form from scratch to which the reply was nothing can be done because too much time had passed. This content was incredibly time intensive to create and was basically another job on top of her position as CEO. As a small company this was a devastating blow. Her work youtube account is now removed. Personally the cynic in me speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all, just a case of over 700 somewhat lengthy videos that were getting almost no traffic, and they get to delete them and hide behind the byzantine garbage fire that is their "support". If you work for the youtube division and can help, I'm begging you please send me a message or reply to this post, it seems this is the only way to rectify this kind of problem. If there is anyway to download the videos that is all we are asking for. -jdh

hogrider 5y ago
Use google at your own peril. Truly evil company.
nicomeemes 5y ago
I've had this exact same experience! Same reason (cyber-bullying) given.
ddingus 5y ago
Keep local copies. Seriously.
sasounian 5y ago
What I dont't understand is that you created 700 critical videos and you did not have any backup of them anywhere? I have a Youtube channel but I know Google can remove the content whenever they want. In 2022, it's time to acknowledge whatever you update inna GAFAM service is not safe and belongs literally to a trash bin with an unknown timer. Good luck to get your video back
smoldesu 5y ago
> youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this scale. Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.
- isatty 5y ago
  I think they know that, there’s no need to repeat the obvious just because it will make ourselves feel better. People fuck up, it’s just a matter of when, and when we do it’s better to help and hope that some day you’ll be helped in turn.
- rco8786 5y ago
  > "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs. Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+. Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the cloud itself IS the backup system. Normal people didn’t just arrive at this conclusion on their own. They were fed it directly from the companies that we are all now supposed to just innately understand are not to be trusted with our data.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Sounds like either side was complicit in the matter. Again, I know it's not an easy pill to swallow (I anticipate both these comments will be dead or grey in time), but that's just how computers work. All the effort we put into abstraction is worthless if it allows (or in this case, encourages) the end-user to make catastrophic mistakes.
implying 5y ago
As useless and pithy it is to say "just restore from backup", having your livelihood (or a significant time investment) depend on a system far outside of your control, where you have no service guarantees or even a billable relationship, is a fairly shaky ground to stand on. Ultimately if you spend your time producing digital assets, you should have taken action to ensure you had ownership and control over them somewhere.
- markdown 5y ago
  I know this, you know this, and OP has for damned sure just realised this, as has anyone else who's read this post. What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    To give everyone else who hasn't done these things a harsh reminder of the damage it could bring if you don't.
    - indymike 5y ago
      Maybe leave out the harsh?
    - stingraycharles 5y ago
      The grandparent’s post sounds like it was written towards the OP, though, not everyone else. If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.
  - rapfaria 5y ago
    I'm not sure OP has realised this, with remarks like "indicating cyber bullying".
  - ______-_-______ 5y ago
    If even one person sees that comment and pulls their content out of the google ecosystem, then the comment was helpful. Run this: youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Thanks for the reminder. Personally I do my part to caution all of my friends and family to not host things they don't want to lose somewhere where they aren't paying the bills. It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.
- suzzer99 5y ago
  Well they could at least give you a chance to download your own content first.
- metabagel 5y ago
  “ It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.” But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    To serve them to public with adds showing. Now make it private and take the view count down... Yeah, should be obvious to anyone.
kozziollek 5y ago
Was her Youtube account removed or whole Google account? I might need to rethink uploading my Factorio speedruns to YT...
- Ekaros 5y ago
  As long as they are public, there is probably no problems. Though I'm not sure how they respond to low popularity content. Still, safest option might be to use unconnected account for it.
  - jquery 5y ago
    It would be nice if YouTube was more transparent about their retention policies.
  - mkl 5y ago
    Public won't prevent the same bogus "cyber-bullying" auto-ban.
999900000999 5y ago
Best of luck to you and your family. That said I feel like going forward y'all need to share work videos internally, rather than depending on YouTube. As an ultra longshot you might find the videos on archive.org This is a thread of someone who was trying to find his old videos . https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-used-to-work-on-the-wayback-machine-dont-work-anymore https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-u...
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  OP said that the videos were unlisted, so that makes it extremely unlikely they can be found on archive.org, unless they were linked from somewhere else.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rectang 5y ago
Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?
- Aunche 5y ago
  YouTube isn't a cloud storage service, let alone one a paid one. I'm not really sure what you'd expect them to do. If they lost access to their free Google drive I'd be more sympathetic.
  - ShoveItHN 5y ago
  - fouc 5y ago
    It kind of is. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then we can effectively treat it like a duck, even if it denies it in the legalese.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  It would. I hope people here work towards their companies regularly warning their customers that any content stored on their services can be gone any day without any warning.
  - rectang 5y ago
    How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      I wonder how that would work, after certain amount of data or time period. For reasonable cost ship a tape archive or similar to customer?
abledon 5y ago
maybe a competitor was tipped off about her business and hired a 'company' to flag the videos
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  Nah, there was a post on HN a month or two ago about YouTube warning they were going to start removing old unlisted videos, and someone on HN pointed out that this would probably affect a lot of companies' training videos
  - detaro 5y ago
    YouTube made old unlisted videos private last year unless you opted-out, are you thinking of that warning?
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Nah, if you read the description the content was flagged and removed; it wasn't because they were old.
- pc86 5y ago
  I'm not aware of any way to programmatically (or manually, for that matter) find unlisted videos.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sitkack 5y ago
If the account can still login in any capacity, please attempt a takeout of the the youtube account. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?pli=1 https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p... This will generate a link that could possibly have an archive of every video uploaded by that account. You don't have have any contact information listed on your account page. Please do so.
- jdhendrickson 5y ago
  I have added contact information, sorry about that, take out reports less than one megabyte. "Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended." This is so incredibly frustrating. I wish I had asked on hacker news before trying for so long to get a response from google.
  - exikyut 5y ago
    Just thinking out loud, I wonder if this falls afoul of the GDPR for users in the EU in any way. This "access is blocked" position kind of leaves hanging whether data has explicitly been retained or deleted; so in scenarios where a user could demonstrate incontrovertible proof that they uploaded some information to a service and did not delete it, it would be interesting to see if the user could leverage freedom-of-information or similar to regain access to their data. My naive guess is that the only legitimate scenario where the service could deny this is where the content is illegal - and I (loosely) understand that the GDPR has stipulations requiring humans to be able to review and revert automated/AI actions applied to user data, so issuing a FOIA-type request could make for a fairly intuitive way to kick the tires in these sorts of situations - worst case scenario the service hands the user their data and tells them to leave, best case scenario (sigh) there's no explanation and everything goes back to normal :( (hmph) *If* this is possible, of course, it only works where the GDPR holds ground - so the EU, sadly. But again, *if* this is actually possible, that's a pretty big win for the GDPR and all the more reason to make noises about it. Which was why I was wondering out loud - I'm curious how far detached my mental model is from reality.
GnarfGnarf 5y ago
Presumably these videos were originally created on your own equipment, before they were uploaded? Are there no copies of the originals anywhere on your local computers? Do you use Macs? Do you have Time Machine?
jquery 5y ago
This is just sad and frustrating to read for multiple reasons.
tech234a 5y ago
In 2021, there was an effort to archive older unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 before they were automatically made private [1]. It's fairly unlikely your videos were archived by this effort unless they were publicly linked somewhere, but you can still try to find them using a tool like: https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch or https://unlistedvideos.com/ https://unlistedvideos.com/. If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there. [1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unlisted_videos_(July_2021) https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unliste... [2]: https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/
- userbinator 5y ago
  If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there. It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.
  - tech234a 5y ago
    From what I understand, the Internet Archive does store some YouTube videos using a special setup, for an example archived video with working playback see: http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtub.... The files can be downloaded from the archive using https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/_OBlgSz8sSM https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch....
hermannj314 5y ago
Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can address?
- adventured 5y ago
  This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should. Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around). The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.
  - tanseydavid 5y ago
    It should be treated like an easement.
    - D13Fd 5y ago
      An easement is actually a very strong real property right. That term doesn't really apply in this context though. Here you just need a "right" to download your content before it is deleted.
  - 5y ago
randartie 5y ago
If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions). That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently. I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you. It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.
- jdhendrickson 5y ago
  This was my thinking as well, it's safer to never delete data and simply null route requests to it. It's what I've done in the past when I was on their side of the ethernet cable. The youtube channel in question. https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/ https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/
  - tech234a 5y ago
    Do you know what the channel ID (UCID) was?
    - jdhendrickson 5y ago
      Unfortunately no, and attempting to go to https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced redirects the suspended account page.
      - tech234a 5y ago
        You may be able to find it in your browser history. For example: youtube.com/channel/UC* or studio.youtube.com/channel/UC*
      - exikyut 5y ago
        You could use https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html to extract your browser cache, then grep the whole thing for something like `UC[A-Za-z_-]{20,30}`. That'll probably find an overwhelming amount of junk, but it might also work too. (The idea is to search the cache for UCID matches in JSON dumps.) If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure. (This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)
xwdv 5y ago
jdhendrickson 5y ago
Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now. I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years. I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it. I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying. This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now. Thanks.
- donatzsky 5y ago
  If you're a paid G-Suite user, you might be able to get help that way. I'm pretty sure I have heard of others doing something like that.
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    In my experience, paid GSuite "support" are just underpaid contractors in developing countries who don't have much power to do anything outside of a few common actions in response to customers' requests.
    - hackermailman 5y ago
      Yep, even if you pay Gsuite you get some guy in the middle of nowhere earth just feeding you macros for support. They don't care at all big gov contracts is their business
    - greggman3 5y ago
squarefoot 5y ago
> "indicating cyber bullying" Oh the irony. Just like deleting user videos for no good reason without warning and not offering any means of appeal.
copperwater69 5y ago
Would a GDPR request have a backup? I think its worth attempting.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
This seems to happen a lot - it might not even be your fault, just someone decided they didn't like your videos and filed a bunch of complaints, or an algorithm misinterpreted some speech. Once the automation sides against you your only recourse is to hope to generate enough social outrage that a human takes notice. The lesson learned is always that YouTube should never be your primary data store, you need to keep the best quality copy of your video in S3 (or similar) so you can rebuild when needed.
ShoveItHN 5y ago
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
FYI, before you chastise the OP for not backing up, please take a minute and think about the fact that this can happen with Gmail too. Have you backed up your email? I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.
- kilroy123 5y ago
  Yes. I started to back up all my gmail emails, years ago, after reading about such horror stories. Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.
- zanethomas 5y ago
  I use protonmail for email I care about.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- smt88 5y ago
  I have been backing up my email since I was a young teenager. These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.
- iforgotpassword 5y ago
  I agree. People quickly jump to "you're not paying for it so what did you expect" but without a warning in big red letters saying "we could fuck you over any day" this has the same vibe as a drug dealer giving you you first hit for free. I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I hope that everyone here has taken action to push for those big warnings in their own SaaS and like products. And from now on always remember to tell that in their sales pitches. As anything else is just evil...
gitgud 5y ago
I wasn't aware that unlisted videos could even receive copyright/bullying strikes, but it seems obvious now. You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....
- rareform 5y ago
  yeah, I've had unlisted/private videos that are a couple years old (with the links shared with no one) get retroactive age-restriction flags or copyright flagging. I'd have to assume YT updates their algo and retroactively skims over some older back-catalog videos.
patchtopic 5y ago
this is most unfortunate, but not having alternate copies outside of a capricious, free service like youtube was the first mistake.
zanethomas 5y ago
i can't understand how anyone would trust the sole copy of their data to any of the big-tech platforms
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Or any single platform. Be it physical or cloud. Single copy is no copy...
- metabagel 5y ago
  We should be able to trust Google to maintain our content.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Why?
mulmen 5y ago
I cant help with Youtube but this is a good reminder to look at your other practices and make sure you aren’t reliant on Google for anything else, and aren’t using free services for other critical functionality.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Or if you are essentially exploiting such service you have sufficient backups(in plural).
  - mulmen 5y ago
    I think it is unfair to describe “using Youtube features for their stated purpose” as “exploitation”.
pembrook 5y ago
After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account. Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail. Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend. Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
  - sneak 5y ago
    The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      > The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
morpheos137 5y ago
This is a good lesson in why you should save data that you care about off line and or in multiple places...
ilamont 5y ago
How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. No recourse. There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank. (Repost #1)
- Ekaros 5y ago
  We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay. Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    > Your expectations from free service should be zero. So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot? It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.
      - 5y ago
jmnicolas 5y ago
If think this can happen if a malicious person (a competitor for example) use a bot to mass report your videos. So it might not be as random as you think. I'm currently in a conundrum: I'm completely degoogled except a YT account that I can lose without problem. I have built a website a few weeks ago and I don't think I can get good SEO rankings if I don't use Google console tools. I'm just procrastinating because it was so hard to degoogle then falling back is a hard pill to swallow. You example is yet another reminder how evil Google is.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I think this is the most likely scenario
- AtNightWeCode 5y ago
  This is the reason why Google stopped demoting sites in a lot of cases. SEO hackers do not only promote results. They try to demote the competition.
- Tijdreiziger 5y ago
  I think it's important to be pragmatic here. I'm (slowly) in the process of moving away from 'big tech' services where I can, but I still plan to use them where it makes sense (WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube). I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently). Taking back our privacy is a noble quest, but I think it's bad to deal in absolutes.
  - bpye 5y ago
    If you want just an email provider I cannot recommend Fastmail enough. Entirely painless, just works and the web UI is fast.
    - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      Fastmail looks great from a UX perspective, but the problem is that they store your e-mail in the US, which I don't want. I'm currently with Soverin, but I'm not completely satisfied with them. If anybody has recommendations for good email providers in the EU, I'm interested to hear them!
mephistophocles 5y ago
The takeaway from this horrible story, and the stories of so many like you guys, is pretty simple. Never use Google products. For anything. Ever. And encourage anyone else who might not know better to never use them either. There are plenty of alternatives. That sucks and it’s a tragic shame. Sorry it happened to you and that there seems to be no recourse.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
keep us posted if youtube makes any attempt to review this and rectify it please.
tim333 5y ago
Not much response from Google or anyone there. I wonder what became of "don't be evil"?
- foxfluff 5y ago
  I lost my email account to automatic suspension roughly a decade ago. I think they've been evil for a very long time now.
temp8964 5y ago
I am confused. Don't you have to create your own videos first and then upload them to YouTube? Or is that a common practice that for people to delete their local copy of videos after they upload to YouTube? I am defenitely not blaming the person in any way. I just don't understand this behavior after have seen this for several times. Why wouldn't you keep your local copy? It just doesn't make any sense to me.
- bootloop 5y ago
  Some (big) creators store all related material and the videos themselves. Others get rid of everything once the video is finished and uploaded. Edit: Of all my YT videos I wouldn't know where I have the sources stored although I never deliberately deleted them.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Is this because video files are very large and store them will be very expensive? I honestly have no idea how large they are, but I would be surprised if it will become a significant portion of the cost of a serious business.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      They can be pretty large. I see point of not storing raw footage, but finished videos after encoding is surely something to keep. Just for in future to upload to other services.. At least if you run actually profitable business.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dynamohk 5y ago
Not great from google, but you need a basic bcp/dr plan for common scenarios especially if service provider goes down for whatever reason.
JodieBenitez 5y ago
The cloud... it's just someone else's computer.
realitysballs 5y ago
This needs greater publicity to shame google/YouTube . I feel the pain here!
gzer0 5y ago
This is extremely concerning, frightening and downright alarming behavior by Google. This was the final straw for me to move off of Gmail, and anything google related. Currently in the process of migrating over 500,000 emails, a small-ish YouTube channel locally backed up, and anything else I can think of. I hope you get your items back. This is absurd. Simply absurd.
qmarchi 5y ago
Heyo, First off, sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It's never the for tools to be abused like this and for support be to be so unreachable. I've gone ahead and sent you an email so I can get some details and we can work to recover at least some of the content. Q. Disc: Googler, but I don't work in YouTube.
- exikyut 5y ago
  :) I hope OP got in touch. Thanks for doing the thing. Reading the thread made me think of a curious idea. It's got a couple layers of nuance, but could ultimately be really cool. In short: have a proactively-updated list somewhere that shows the presentation and content of every single email that will be sent before someone is due to lose access to a given service or their whole account. For example this could look like a (perhaps loosely-interconnected) web of support.google URLs with content like "you might receive an email like the following" <insert HTML extract/embed or screenshot of exactly what the email looks like here> "and you can do" <insert brick wall here :)>. If this were a reliable resource that stuck around, I could totally see a community-maintained tool emerging that would monitor for these sorts of emails then eg send emergency SMS/notifications/etc so that carefully-coordinated action could be undertaken immediately by competent users. These notifications could be sent to a tech-savvy family member or associate/colleague, who likely would not otherwise have access to the account in question. This person could then gain impromptu access (perhaps via remote access) and take immediate action such as generating takeouts (and perhaps sharding them to raise the chances they complete in time), individully downloading or screenshotting critical info, and firing out bulk alerts reminding of alternate contact info. Basically disaster-handling to try to end-cap workflow disruption while the mess (hOpEfUlLy) gets fixed. I can't help but think there's probably a disconcertingly large proportion of grandmas and effectively-illiterate users being caught in situations where they have very literally no idea how to proceed (eg, none of their Facebook friends are going to have a clue). It would seem there is enough awareness and reactivity localized around HN to make a difference to that 99th percentile, if harnessed in a constructive and non-disruptive way. It's a nuanced idea, but I'm reminded of the old YouTube story where optimizing the homepage made the site seem to load slower because it became viewable by a large demographic of people using sub-2G connections. Here, I can certainly see a temporary uptick in apparent legitimate account closures as the true false positive gap is surfaced, and that might translate to a bit of a suboptimal reputation hit. But in the ideal case, the new feedback would be integrated quickly, that transient spike would soon be forgotten, and in the long term, integrating the new data would help to further micro-optimize the performance of the 99th percentiles involved with the ML analytics processes in ways that exceed expectations. I'm thinking of the bigger-bigger picture; I understand it's simply impossible for Google to provide tier-one support to every single one of their four billion+ free users. This approach could implement an unorthodox workaround that lets motivated individuals contribute toward closing the loop of false positives. Currently it is effectively impossible for Google's userbase to take charge of this particular edge case. I am sure the number of people who would be very happy to take preventative action against false positives completely outweighs (perhaps by an order of magnitude) those who posture and rage and make themselves look stupid in the forums when things don't go their way. Knowing what all (or almost all) warning emails look like ahead of time is the only way a significant dent could be made in the false positive statistics; there's nothing stopping a detection project from getting off the ground today, but the lists of what content patterns to look for would have to be forged in blood by users who've had their accounts shut down, with this status quo compounded every time the wording of the warning emails changes. The one caveat emptor I can think of is that there is of course no way to prevent malicious users from taking advantage of a community initiative that enables a heightened baseline of proactivity, especially if it goes viral and is easy to use. But I'm honestly curious... how might this be the end of the world? The worst the malicious users can do is download their data, which a) they probably have a copy of anyway, and if they don't, b) wouldn't be a great look in legal cases where a defense can say "here is evidence ABC used XYZ software to monitor their account for shutdown, which is why shortly after *point* this email was sent they *point* submitted a takeout request 5 minutes later." I can definitely see some legal/regulatory/policy hesitancy (sigh), but (from my position as a relatively naive random internet user) I'm hopeful that hesitancy would mostly be without precedential substance, and this could actually viably happen with a bit of gruntwork and convincing.
ishanr 5y ago
That's why I created https://megatorium.com/ https://megatorium.com/ YouTube is too random and uncontrollable.
mysterydip 5y ago
How did she create the videos in the first place? Are the original videos used to upload to youtube accessible or archived somewhere?
quickthrower2 5y ago
I wonder if Google Takeout would have the content? Definitely try that. Also try a GDPR request. Not sure if that will work but that might get you a backup copy if they have it. If people have watched the videos recently there might be some local cache on their computers you can grab.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
powera 5y ago
As the saying goes, if you're not paying, you are the product. There are so many ways that "a few hundred internal training videos" could violate YouTube policy I'm just going to assume you were violating policy and didn't know it. In other words, the "always have a back-up of anything important you store in a free Google account" people are 100% correct.
slyall 5y ago
Happens with other companies too. My partner currently has their twitter account locked for "evading a ban". The thing is it is their main account, under their own name, used regularly to post non-controversial stuff (and their other accounts(not locked) are even more boring). No indication of what ban they are trying to avoid even. Their only weird thing they are doing is using VPNs sometimes. They have filed an appeal but it has been a week and no feedback of any kind.
- batch12 5y ago
  Sounds to me like a VPN IP was associated with a different banned account and the reuse of that IP by your partner associated your partner's account with the banned one.
wizardofmysore 5y ago
Depending on how valuable the videos are, you might consider sending a legal notice to Google.
datavirtue 5y ago
The videos were only stored on YouYube???
gurumeditations 5y ago
I agree with others that users need a technology bill of rights. We also need heavy handed breakup of the tech giants into their constituent parts so that more competition will make smaller businesses fight over how well they can treat people instead of how big they can grow.
devwastaken 5y ago
Had something similar happen years ago. 3x bogus copyright strikes and the entire channel was removed. Can't appeal. Even big content creators get bogus strikes, but they have representatives or something that dispute it with YouTube. Don't use YouTube for anything important.
- oezi 5y ago
  Why can't you appeal? Did you get a lawyer?
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    The cost of a lawyer is far too high. When you appeal you are legally saying that their dmca is false. Typically by this time the company will back off, or, they won't, and now your only choice is to persue it in civil court and prove their dmca was false. Or, the company can even come after you for falsely saying that their dmca was false. It's not worth it. It's like civil asset forfeiture. The cost of getting back what was illigally seized is higher than the worth of it. In both time and money.
jb3689 5y ago
I used to work for a cloud backup company. People thought it was strange to backup services like Google Drive and Gmail. Posts like this make me second think that
spoonjim 5y ago
One very important thing for everyone to remember is to NOT USE ANY GOOGLE SERVICES BESIDES YOUTUBE. If you get banned from Google for something on your Google Drive, and lose your YouTube account, there's no alternative YouTube. You're fucked. But if you lose your ProtonMail account there are plenty of other email vendors, you'll be fine. STICK TO YOUTUBE ONLY.
newscracker 5y ago
OP, I can’t help except upvote the post for visibility. But if or when you get those videos, I hope you’d move to a platform that works for its customers (who are the users). In the case of YouTube, your wife was not the customer. Continuing to support such abusive platforms once any rogue bot activity is controlled would be harmful. Edit: I just read one of the OP’s comments about backups not being there and how that should’ve been planned. Please disregard the below paragraph, OP. I’m still leaving it around for others. Also, please always have backups of videos uploaded anywhere for sharing. I get that this may be irritating to read right now, but data that’s not stored on one’s hardware cannot be trusted to be around for long.
gverrilla 5y ago
I feel bad for introducing google to so many people in the old days. Hard scam
cdelsolar 5y ago
Google is the fucking worst. A few years ago I uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music, rather than carrying it around with me through different computers and backups. This was a bunch of priceless stuff -- mp3s from tiny bands (some of whom I personally knew) that cannot be gotten anywhere anymore, recordings of my own bands in college, etc. Of course I deleted them from my devices, and then a few weeks ago I want to listen to one of the songs, and it turns out they're all gone forever. Google Music discontinued a while ago. How do I get these songs back? I literally have zero recourse.
- Zathman 5y ago
  Over a year ago Google Music sent out notices that users can download or migrate their uploaded media to YouTube Music via https://music.youtube.com/transfer https://music.youtube.com/transfer. There really wasn't a shortage of notices and blog posts across a wide variety of media outlets instructing people to migrate and warning when Google Music was shutting down.
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    I got those notices and in my case it was "only" dozens of CDs I backed up. I was so frustrated and disgusted that I had taken time to back them up to Google Music that I just let them go. I still have the CDs, hopefully they are still in good enough condition to be backed up again.
    - Zathman 5y ago
      YouTube Music was really rough in the beginning, and while I still have some UI nitpicks, I've come to find its radio algorithm to be much superior than Google Music's ever was for finding enjoyably obscure tracks. The tracks I uploaded to Google Music and transferred to YouTube Music are still playable through YouTube Music and downloadable from Google Takeout. If you migrated your library to YouTube Music, you may yet be able to download them from https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com (YouTube and YouTube Music).
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
You delegated the only and original copies of the works to a cloud entity? This wasn't YouTube's fault. It was your company's. Let this be a lesson to you and start making offline, offsite backups of your work. Today it was YouTube, tomorrow it could be ransomware. Be glad it was only some videos.
S_A_P 5y ago
YouTube deleted my account a few months ago. The reason was totally unfounded and I had no recourse. I’m pretty certain some AI flagged my account and instead of a sensible approach like 1) notify the user that something they did was flagged. 2) point to the instance where the supposed bad behavior happened and allow review/context by humans 3) see that my YouTube account was 12-13 years old and had only a handful of personal videos and 1-2 public videos and that I have a long history of not behaving badly Instead I got a flippant response to my query as to why it was deleted and I quote: “Yeah I’m going to go ahead and deny your claim”. As far as I’m concerned the less Google I have in my life from now on the better. While I don’t think that the other options are much better, this incident has changed me from having not much of an opinion on Google to having a pretty seething dislike for them.
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  Infuriating. I know it’s a private company but the internet feels much less free recently. The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup and slideshows. So basically stuff that is backed up elsewhere. I want more decentralized solutions. The problem is that they are costly.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    > The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup I hope this thread has really shown you why this isn't a good idea. YouTube is video distribution not archive.
- Tozen 5y ago
  The arrogance and abusiveness of Google/YouTube is that they don't see any competition nor have fear of legal actions against them by "lowly" "nobody" users. More people have to choose alternatives to the point that Google/YouTube management will notice and be concerned about.
kc10 5y ago
This is extremely concerning. I have several of my daughter's childhood videos on YT as private videos and several hundreds of GBs of pictures in Google photos. And I literally don't have any backup for all this content. I previously used external drives, but I moved them to the cloud so they are easily accessible and not have the risk of hardware failures. I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff.
- root_axis 5y ago
  > I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff Certainly not, but if you're going to rely on cloud providers at all, definitely don't rely on ones that you aren't paying since they have no obligation to ensure your data stays online. If you're paying for your hosting you have established a legal contract that protects you from capricious access loss like the one described in the OP.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Do a google takeout. Now. Is good for you and is good for Google not having to bear the unique responsibility over your memories. Win-win.
- Too 5y ago
  Use the 321 rule. 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 of them off site. You should keep your external drive backups. “Cloud” gives you the off site, but by itself from the point of a user it is just 1 media and 1 backup. Even if they likely have a lot more internally.
pmarreck 5y ago
Don't leave your only copy of your work with a company that is so big that finding human tech-support would be nearly impossible
eqtn 5y ago
if you are in India, as a last resort you should file a complaint with consumer court and see what happens.
nojvek 5y ago
This is kind of dumb. At-least YouTube should have a form of downloading archived videos if the account is deactivated. They probably have them on their servers anyway. Some of this makes me feel like there should be some form of law. If you ban/delete someone’s account, and the data they had was not illegal .e.g child porn, you gotta hand it over.
WalterBright 5y ago
Let's face it. If you use a cloud service for any critical business service, such as processing payments, or data storage, you're liable to get "turned off" for any random reason by an algorithm. You have no recourse whatsoever. Have your own personal backups of all your valuable data, emails, videos, pictures, etc. As I learned from expensive experience, if you use a cloud payment processor, have it set up with at least two distinct companies. Yeah, I got turned off by an algorithm on one. Their support sent me pathetically worthless AI generated emails. After a couple months, I got it turned back on finally because I personally knew someone at the company. Obviously, this is not a general solution. Always have a backup service plan at another company.
dkd903 5y ago
hnshit2 5y ago
gbraad 5y ago
Never rely on an online services to be a safe/backup location to store your files. If they are important to you. Keep them somewhere else too
causality0 5y ago
speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all Why speculate? Ask your wife if she uses copyrighted content in her videos. Her response should tell you if she was flagged by an automated content-ID system. All else aside, this is a lesson in never having only one copy of anything remotely important.
Animats 5y ago
"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
honkycat 5y ago
Google will kill your entire business via AI filtering and refuse to even acknowledge you exist while you lose your home and life after investing in and building their platforms.
sireat 5y ago
This is extremely concerning. I also have over 500 unlisted training videos - seen by average of 10-30 people each. Most are boring IntelliJ or VS Code screencasts. However some contain small outtakes from other Youtube videos - this could potentially trigger a strike. SSD holding originals died without warning. Time to download everything and invest into archive grade Blu-ray or LTO tapes.
- unosama 5y ago
  You can also mirror them to other video services... One of the new ones will do it for you automatically. Odysee.com I believe.
vero2 5y ago
> Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. Do you know by chance if anyone "internal employees" tried to complain and report? I suspect this is an insider issue. may be some internal staff, downloaded everything and reported these videos to kill your wife's business and to start their own business.
pvaldes 5y ago
Can we ask for the name of the channel?
IshKebab 5y ago
If she's in Europe maybe a GDPR personal data request? Long shot.
mro_name 5y ago
> This content was incredibly time intensive to create why did she trash the origins? And please, do indieweb.org/POSSE - look at PeerTube and maybe distribute copies via YT but never exclusively or even rely on them as an archive. Please.
- unosama 5y ago
  What is indieweb.net? The link is just squatted for me
  - mro_name 5y ago
    Thx, stupid me, it's indieweb.org/POSSE. Fixed above, too.
alangibson 5y ago
A bit late, but I started burning important media to MDISCs then giving them to friends that swing by. I ask them to toss them in the top of their closet and forget about them. Makes multiple redundant backups cheap and easy.
samoit 5y ago
Lessons to learn here, Do not base your work on 3ºparties, always do backups of your videos/work. The easiest way it is not the safest one...
vermorel 5y ago
It might be too late, but for others, PeerTube, open source replacement of YouTube, is the solution. Longer discussion https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-replace-youtube.html https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-repl...
- elcomet 5y ago
  I don't see how this is a solution. Either you host it on a public instance and the admin can delete your videos as well, or you host it yourself, but it requires technical abilities and lots of money.
tveyben 5y ago
No backup and ‘all the eggs in one basket’. Seems to me like a high risk to take. ‘Backup being too expensive’ surely there can’t be that many videos (a $business$ should be able to afford a few ~10TB usb disks for a few hundred $/€). I have no trust in services like YT (where I am the product) so I host my own data on my own server and roll my own backups - on/off-site - (thus have only myself to blame if it goes bad). I have actually been thinking if I should yt-dl the good videos I have found on YT for exactly the incident you have been exposed to! I really feel for your loss - and really hope that a human contact will be made so the content can be retrieved. Hopefully HN attention might help! It’s a sad world where so-called AI makes the decisions and it’s almost impossible to get in touch with a real live human being. I fear for the future (your experience being a good example of how bad it can go). Just think about when those methodologies get applied to the legal-system or health-system. ‘Appeal - not possible the AI knows better and have decided…’ Hmm - I think I read it already started in the police-domain with face-detection…
throwawayffffas 5y ago
That is a rather unfortunate position to be in. My 2 cents this is important enough you shouldn't have to keep playing around with their UI and support. Get a lawyer to speak to their lawyers about your data, that way at least you are gonna get a respectful answer even though the answer might be we deleted the videos and you can never get it back.
sinuhe69 5y ago
How long is the average video? 1-2 hours? Then I think the average size of the videos will be 1-2 GB for FHD solution with h.264 compression; maybe double the size for fast compression. But even so, 700+ videos will require a few TB of storage only. You can buy some 1-2 TB mobile HDD to store them offline, just in case. It’s nothing fancy but very easy to handle, cheap and works in most cases. Most people store their photos in this way, if I’m not mistaken.
husamia 5y ago
I remember getting an email that unlisted videos will be removed.
ecesena 5y ago
Have you tried requesting google/youtube all your (her) data? If the videos aren’t there you can almost certainly proceed with a lawyer since you know they should be there (and almost certainly they’re not permanently deleted).
notananthem 5y ago
Why would you use a free service for any work things ever
aabbcc1241 5y ago
Using IPFS to distribute videos may prevent lost in this situation. You got backup and p2p distribution at the same time.
xtat 5y ago
Another one. How many stories like this never make it to the front page?
Tozen 5y ago
Sad situation, and hindsight is always 20/20 with such. Probably would have been good to have also uploaded videos to other similar sites/alternatives like Dailymotion, DTube, etc... In addition to the free/cheap cloud storage options or buying external HDDs. Google/YouTube will continue to ignore, abuse, and gaslight when they think there isn't any competition and can get away with it.

1061 points by jdhendrickson 5y ago

hogrider 5y ago

Use google at your own peril. Truly evil company.

nicomeemes 5y ago

I've had this exact same experience! Same reason (cyber-bullying) given.

ddingus 5y ago

Keep local copies. Seriously.

sasounian 5y ago

What I dont't understand is that you created 700 critical videos and you did not have any backup of them anywhere? I have a Youtube channel but I know Google can remove the content whenever they want. In 2022, it's time to acknowledge whatever you update inna GAFAM service is not safe and belongs literally to a trash bin with an unknown timer. Good luck to get your video back

smoldesu 5y ago

> youtube deleted 700 videos created for internal training for our company I don't mean to be an asshole, but nobody guarantees you that your videos will stay up perpetually on YouTube. Especially if you've got hundreds of private or unlisted videos, it doesn't particularly surprise me that YouTube would pull them down, even if only for petty reasons. If you've been following the state of their website over the past few years, this sort of behavior is becoming quite common, and even among YouTubers with millions of followers I don't think I've seen them reverse a claim of this scale. Yes, it's a shame. If you don't have them on your own computer though, then are they really yours? It's a hard way to learn that local backups are important, and "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs.

isatty 5y ago
I think they know that, there’s no need to repeat the obvious just because it will make ourselves feel better. People fuck up, it’s just a matter of when, and when we do it’s better to help and hope that some day you’ll be helped in turn.
rco8786 5y ago
> "the cloud" isn't a panacea for your storage needs. Except that is exactly how cloud companies market themselves. That is exactly what cloud companies have been telling consumers for a decade+. Right up to the point of commercials showing someone lose a device and saying “no worries, it’s all in the cloud!”, etc. We’ve been told for years that our data is safer in the cloud than it is on our own devices. That the cloud itself IS the backup system. Normal people didn’t just arrive at this conclusion on their own. They were fed it directly from the companies that we are all now supposed to just innately understand are not to be trusted with our data.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Sounds like either side was complicit in the matter. Again, I know it's not an easy pill to swallow (I anticipate both these comments will be dead or grey in time), but that's just how computers work. All the effort we put into abstraction is worthless if it allows (or in this case, encourages) the end-user to make catastrophic mistakes.

implying 5y ago

As useless and pithy it is to say "just restore from backup", having your livelihood (or a significant time investment) depend on a system far outside of your control, where you have no service guarantees or even a billable relationship, is a fairly shaky ground to stand on. Ultimately if you spend your time producing digital assets, you should have taken action to ensure you had ownership and control over them somewhere.

markdown 5y ago
I know this, you know this, and OP has for damned sure just realised this, as has anyone else who's read this post. What the purpose of your comment? It's not helpful.
- sodality2 5y ago
  To give everyone else who hasn't done these things a harsh reminder of the damage it could bring if you don't.
  - indymike 5y ago
    Maybe leave out the harsh?
  - stingraycharles 5y ago
    The grandparent’s post sounds like it was written towards the OP, though, not everyone else. If that weren’t the case, I agree with you, it’s a good message to spread.
- rapfaria 5y ago
  I'm not sure OP has realised this, with remarks like "indicating cyber bullying".
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  If even one person sees that comment and pulls their content out of the google ecosystem, then the comment was helpful. Run this: youtube-dl https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel https://youtube.com/c/MyChannel and have a snack while it finishes. You'll thank yourself later.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Thanks for the reminder. Personally I do my part to caution all of my friends and family to not host things they don't want to lose somewhere where they aren't paying the bills. It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.

suzzer99 5y ago
Well they could at least give you a chance to download your own content first.
metabagel 5y ago
“ It's odd that otherwise smart businesspeople think that companies will store their files forever, without being paid for it.” But that’s Google’s business model. The service is free.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  To serve them to public with adds showing. Now make it private and take the view count down... Yeah, should be obvious to anyone.

kozziollek 5y ago

Was her Youtube account removed or whole Google account? I might need to rethink uploading my Factorio speedruns to YT...

Ekaros 5y ago
As long as they are public, there is probably no problems. Though I'm not sure how they respond to low popularity content. Still, safest option might be to use unconnected account for it.
- jquery 5y ago
  It would be nice if YouTube was more transparent about their retention policies.
- mkl 5y ago
  Public won't prevent the same bogus "cyber-bullying" auto-ban.

999900000999 5y ago

Best of luck to you and your family. That said I feel like going forward y'all need to share work videos internally, rather than depending on YouTube. As an ultra longshot you might find the videos on archive.org This is a thread of someone who was trying to find his old videos . https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-used-to-work-on-the-wayback-machine-dont-work-anymore https://archive.org/post/1102732/many-youtube-videos-which-u...

stingraycharles 5y ago
OP said that the videos were unlisted, so that makes it extremely unlikely they can be found on archive.org, unless they were linked from somewhere else.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rectang 5y ago

Lots of commenters rushing to chastise the user for not taking pro-active steps to preserve content, since your Google account (or any cloud account once a provider decides you've violated their Terms of Service) may go "poof". Wouldn't it be nice if the platforms themselves helped out with this, instead of luring their users into a false sense of security?

Aunche 5y ago
YouTube isn't a cloud storage service, let alone one a paid one. I'm not really sure what you'd expect them to do. If they lost access to their free Google drive I'd be more sympathetic.
- ShoveItHN 5y ago
- fouc 5y ago
  It kind of is. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, then we can effectively treat it like a duck, even if it denies it in the legalese.
Ekaros 5y ago
It would. I hope people here work towards their companies regularly warning their customers that any content stored on their services can be gone any day without any warning.
- rectang 5y ago
  How about if durable archival was an upsell alongside upload?
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    I wonder how that would work, after certain amount of data or time period. For reasonable cost ship a tape archive or similar to customer?

abledon 5y ago

maybe a competitor was tipped off about her business and hired a 'company' to flag the videos

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
Nah, there was a post on HN a month or two ago about YouTube warning they were going to start removing old unlisted videos, and someone on HN pointed out that this would probably affect a lot of companies' training videos
- detaro 5y ago
  YouTube made old unlisted videos private last year unless you opted-out, are you thinking of that warning?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Nah, if you read the description the content was flagged and removed; it wasn't because they were old.
pc86 5y ago
I'm not aware of any way to programmatically (or manually, for that matter) find unlisted videos.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

sitkack 5y ago

If the account can still login in any capacity, please attempt a takeout of the the youtube account. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?pli=1 https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/custom/youtube?p... This will generate a link that could possibly have an archive of every video uploaded by that account. You don't have have any contact information listed on your account page. Please do so.

jdhendrickson 5y ago
I have added contact information, sorry about that, take out reports less than one megabyte. "Unable to access a Google product If you've been redirected to this page from a particular product, it means that your access to this product has been suspended." This is so incredibly frustrating. I wish I had asked on hacker news before trying for so long to get a response from google.
- exikyut 5y ago
  Just thinking out loud, I wonder if this falls afoul of the GDPR for users in the EU in any way. This "access is blocked" position kind of leaves hanging whether data has explicitly been retained or deleted; so in scenarios where a user could demonstrate incontrovertible proof that they uploaded some information to a service and did not delete it, it would be interesting to see if the user could leverage freedom-of-information or similar to regain access to their data. My naive guess is that the only legitimate scenario where the service could deny this is where the content is illegal - and I (loosely) understand that the GDPR has stipulations requiring humans to be able to review and revert automated/AI actions applied to user data, so issuing a FOIA-type request could make for a fairly intuitive way to kick the tires in these sorts of situations - worst case scenario the service hands the user their data and tells them to leave, best case scenario (sigh) there's no explanation and everything goes back to normal :( (hmph) *If* this is possible, of course, it only works where the GDPR holds ground - so the EU, sadly. But again, *if* this is actually possible, that's a pretty big win for the GDPR and all the more reason to make noises about it. Which was why I was wondering out loud - I'm curious how far detached my mental model is from reality.

GnarfGnarf 5y ago

Presumably these videos were originally created on your own equipment, before they were uploaded? Are there no copies of the originals anywhere on your local computers? Do you use Macs? Do you have Time Machine?

jquery 5y ago

This is just sad and frustrating to read for multiple reasons.

tech234a 5y ago

In 2021, there was an effort to archive older unlisted videos uploaded before 2017 before they were automatically made private [1]. It's fairly unlikely your videos were archived by this effort unless they were publicly linked somewhere, but you can still try to find them using a tool like: https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch or https://unlistedvideos.com/ https://unlistedvideos.com/. If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there. [1]: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unlisted_videos_(July_2021) https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube#Older_unliste... [2]: https://web.archive.org/ https://web.archive.org/

userbinator 5y ago
If you do find any of them on the list, you can try pull them up from the Web Archive [2] and save them from there. It's been over a decade since YT would simply allow you to download the video file directly (does anyone still remember the "s/watch?v=/get_video?video_id=/" trick?), probably for DRM reasons. Even if it did, I doubt the Internet Archive would have bothered to try archiving due to the immense volume that video takes.
- tech234a 5y ago
  From what I understand, the Internet Archive does store some YouTube videos using a special setup, for an example archived video with working playback see: http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM http://web.archive.org/web/20210716000952/https://www.youtub.... The files can be downloaded from the archive using https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/_OBlgSz8sSM https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch....

hermannj314 5y ago

Is there an effort to build a solution to problems like this that don't rely on a friend of a friend from Google 'fixing' things. At some point the FDA didn't exist and we decided to create it to regulate an industry. At some point, fair credit reporting didn't exist and we decided to create that to regulate a different industry. Is there a real and lasting solution to this problem that the firm hand of democracy can address?

adventured 5y ago
This is similar to leaving your personal property contents in a storage locker / unit / container that you don't own. Except it being digital, and given the storage isn't / never was being paid for, you're going to get that much less sympathy from the judicial system - entirely appropriately. No, there's no legislative solution to something like this. The content owner has no standing and it's difficult to find an argument in favor of why they should. Use services of companies you can trust, and or host your own content. If the content is important, pay for its hosting, because that's the rational thing to do, buy the service level to match the value of your content. That's the correct solution to this problem. You can't trust YouTube in that sort of use case and we don't need a giant new federal agency to make YouTube host videos long-term against their will, it's absurd. Hosting those videos on Hetzner or DigitalOcean or similar would be inexpensive for a small business (or use a paid video hosting service, I'm sure there are several of those around). The content owner likely wanted to use YouTube because it's free. That turned out as one might expect.
- tanseydavid 5y ago
  It should be treated like an easement.
  - D13Fd 5y ago
    An easement is actually a very strong real property right. That term doesn't really apply in this context though. Here you just need a "right" to download your content before it is deleted.
- 5y ago

randartie 5y ago

If I had to speculate based off my experience at other FANG companies, the videos still exist in the Youtube infrastructure somewhere to allow for the possibility of a human intervention to restore them (For example, to allow for recovering from a system gone haywire or just to give time for manually reversed decisions). That said, I'd also guess there's a countdown timer before they get deleted permanently. I hope you can get a human from YouTube to talk to you. It may benefit you to post a link to the youtube channel so someone can proactively investigate. Lots of google employees read this forum.

jdhendrickson 5y ago
This was my thinking as well, it's safer to never delete data and simply null route requests to it. It's what I've done in the past when I was on their side of the ethernet cable. The youtube channel in question. https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/ https://www.youtube.com/user/tranresearchtraining/
- tech234a 5y ago
  Do you know what the channel ID (UCID) was?
  - jdhendrickson 5y ago
    Unfortunately no, and attempting to go to https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced https://www.youtube.com/account_advanced redirects the suspended account page.
    - tech234a 5y ago
      You may be able to find it in your browser history. For example: youtube.com/channel/UC* or studio.youtube.com/channel/UC*
    - exikyut 5y ago
      You could use https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chrome_cache_view.html to extract your browser cache, then grep the whole thing for something like `UC[A-Za-z_-]{20,30}`. That'll probably find an overwhelming amount of junk, but it might also work too. (The idea is to search the cache for UCID matches in JSON dumps.) If this seems interesting, the immediate priority would be to backup your cache folder immediately (%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache), then extract and search it at your leisure. (This is all for Windows, but IIUC there are alternatives for Linux and macOS.)

xwdv 5y ago

jdhendrickson 5y ago

Mea Culpa I'm in the industry. I knew we should have had backups. She is brilliant but not technical and while the backups would have been expensive and difficult due to size, I should have built multiple NAS and distributed them geographically and used Syncthing to keep them updated. To be clear we were legacy G-suite users and have converted to paying customers, so it was a free service while this happened, and is a paid service (I guess is youtube part of that?) now. I just assumed if there was a problem we could youtube-dl everything, it didn't occur to me that control of the account would be suspended arbitrarily with no recourse for literally no reason. Despite reading about similar things here for years. I guess I just thought those were lightning strikes, and I was focusing my time outside of work on the new SPA rollout we were working on for the company. I understand excuses like armpits are something we all have and they all smell, so I'll just say I fucked up and own it. I appreciate all the advice and I understand why you are all saying what you are saying. This was spur of the moment post (I didn't think it through) and I hadn't updated my contact information on my profile. I've done so now. Thanks.

donatzsky 5y ago
If you're a paid G-Suite user, you might be able to get help that way. I'm pretty sure I have heard of others doing something like that.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  In my experience, paid GSuite "support" are just underpaid contractors in developing countries who don't have much power to do anything outside of a few common actions in response to customers' requests.
  - hackermailman 5y ago
    Yep, even if you pay Gsuite you get some guy in the middle of nowhere earth just feeding you macros for support. They don't care at all big gov contracts is their business
  - greggman3 5y ago

squarefoot 5y ago

> "indicating cyber bullying" Oh the irony. Just like deleting user videos for no good reason without warning and not offering any means of appeal.

copperwater69 5y ago

Would a GDPR request have a backup? I think its worth attempting.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

This seems to happen a lot - it might not even be your fault, just someone decided they didn't like your videos and filed a bunch of complaints, or an algorithm misinterpreted some speech. Once the automation sides against you your only recourse is to hope to generate enough social outrage that a human takes notice. The lesson learned is always that YouTube should never be your primary data store, you need to keep the best quality copy of your video in S3 (or similar) so you can rebuild when needed.

ShoveItHN 5y ago

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

FYI, before you chastise the OP for not backing up, please take a minute and think about the fact that this can happen with Gmail too. Have you backed up your email? I think Google has the responsibility to make it VERY clear that you can lose access to your content without notice. I don't think users truly understand that now.

kilroy123 5y ago
Yes. I started to back up all my gmail emails, years ago, after reading about such horror stories. Eventually, I just switched to fastmail and gave up Google altogether.
zanethomas 5y ago
I use protonmail for email I care about.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smt88 5y ago
I have been backing up my email since I was a young teenager. These days, I grab my Google Takeout every year or so and also have a Fastmail account that pulls in every other email I receive.
iforgotpassword 5y ago
I agree. People quickly jump to "you're not paying for it so what did you expect" but without a warning in big red letters saying "we could fuck you over any day" this has the same vibe as a drug dealer giving you you first hit for free. I lost access to my Yahoo mail address from teenage days and consecutively the YouTube account associated with it. The videos are still up and it's just random shenanigans, but still. Learned my lesson with big tech companies.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  I hope that everyone here has taken action to push for those big warnings in their own SaaS and like products. And from now on always remember to tell that in their sales pitches. As anything else is just evil...

gitgud 5y ago

I wasn't aware that unlisted videos could even receive copyright/bullying strikes, but it seems obvious now. You could easily ruin someone's YouTube channel by finding unlisted videos through the rest of the Web and reporting them, like this poor couple have found out....

rareform 5y ago
yeah, I've had unlisted/private videos that are a couple years old (with the links shared with no one) get retroactive age-restriction flags or copyright flagging. I'd have to assume YT updates their algo and retroactively skims over some older back-catalog videos.

patchtopic 5y ago

this is most unfortunate, but not having alternate copies outside of a capricious, free service like youtube was the first mistake.

zanethomas 5y ago

i can't understand how anyone would trust the sole copy of their data to any of the big-tech platforms

Ekaros 5y ago
Or any single platform. Be it physical or cloud. Single copy is no copy...
metabagel 5y ago
We should be able to trust Google to maintain our content.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Why?

mulmen 5y ago

I cant help with Youtube but this is a good reminder to look at your other practices and make sure you aren’t reliant on Google for anything else, and aren’t using free services for other critical functionality.

Ekaros 5y ago
Or if you are essentially exploiting such service you have sufficient backups(in plural).
- mulmen 5y ago
  I think it is unfair to describe “using Youtube features for their stated purpose” as “exploitation”.

pembrook 5y ago

After seeing posts like this on HN for years, this one officially scared me enough to completely migrate off Gmail altogether. I’m in the process right now of removing my gmail from any online account. Pro-tip: if you use a password manager, it’s as easy as searching for your Gmail address. For all other accounts, I’ve been able to find them by searching for the phrases “verify your email” or “verify email” or “verification” in Gmail. Just imagining the nightmare that would happen if I got locked out of my Gmail account (10 years of accounts)…I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. You can also do a full export of your Google data, which I highly recommend. Switched to fastmail recently for my personal domain and could not be happier with the service. It costs money every month, so they have actual human support if anything goes wrong.

alasdair_ 5y ago
Your post reminded me to back using my gmail locally and to ensure a script does so automatically from now on. I need to do the same with google docs as soon as possible. I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”
- sneak 5y ago
  The danger is not just that Google may one day delete your data, maybe. The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    > The danger is that an advertising surveillance company that has leveraged its ad surveillance into hundreds of billions of dollars per year in revenue has access to (and uses!) 100% of your personal correspondence, today and every day, no maybe. There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.

morpheos137 5y ago

This is a good lesson in why you should save data that you care about off line and or in multiple places...

ilamont 5y ago

How many more pleas like this will we see on HN? Or, hear from friends, colleagues, and relatives who have been locked out or denied access to an important service, either through no fault of their own or by an innocent action? No warning. No explanation other than "suspicious activity" or "violation of [vaguely worded] policy." No human to call who can help troubleshoot, other than a tech-savvy friend or relative. No recourse. There needs to be a technology bill of rights, not just for people dealing with Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, but also the myriad other technology operators which can disrupt our lives in an instant with some poorly programmed process or unanticipated edge case. Ultimately, the OP or my non-tech savvy employee or my mother should be able to get real answers and/or help from a human being when wronged by Google, a telco, or the local bank. (Repost #1)

Ekaros 5y ago
We need education. Education to regular people that unless you have a contract with clear clauses and payments involved your data is worth what you pay. Your expectations from free service should be zero. It can go out of business at any time. Or they can stop offering it at anytime.
- foxfluff 5y ago
  > Your expectations from free service should be zero. So it's ok if someone takes your car the next time you park on a free parking lot? It doesn't work that way in the physical world. I don't see why it should work that way in the digital world. Offering to hold your property for free isn't a license to steal or destroy it.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Cities already move your vehicle away if you leave it in free parking spot for years, even faster if it is unregistered for example. I don't see how that is any different from this case for example. There are similar analogies.
    - 5y ago

jmnicolas 5y ago

If think this can happen if a malicious person (a competitor for example) use a bot to mass report your videos. So it might not be as random as you think. I'm currently in a conundrum: I'm completely degoogled except a YT account that I can lose without problem. I have built a website a few weeks ago and I don't think I can get good SEO rankings if I don't use Google console tools. I'm just procrastinating because it was so hard to degoogle then falling back is a hard pill to swallow. You example is yet another reminder how evil Google is.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I think this is the most likely scenario
AtNightWeCode 5y ago
This is the reason why Google stopped demoting sites in a lot of cases. SEO hackers do not only promote results. They try to demote the competition.
Tijdreiziger 5y ago
I think it's important to be pragmatic here. I'm (slowly) in the process of moving away from 'big tech' services where I can, but I still plan to use them where it makes sense (WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube). I'm also evaluating e-mail for a small business and we might be going with Microsoft, even though I would never choose them for my personal e-mail (I left some comments on that topic recently). Taking back our privacy is a noble quest, but I think it's bad to deal in absolutes.
- bpye 5y ago
  If you want just an email provider I cannot recommend Fastmail enough. Entirely painless, just works and the web UI is fast.
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    Fastmail looks great from a UX perspective, but the problem is that they store your e-mail in the US, which I don't want. I'm currently with Soverin, but I'm not completely satisfied with them. If anybody has recommendations for good email providers in the EU, I'm interested to hear them!

mephistophocles 5y ago

The takeaway from this horrible story, and the stories of so many like you guys, is pretty simple. Never use Google products. For anything. Ever. And encourage anyone else who might not know better to never use them either. There are plenty of alternatives. That sucks and it’s a tragic shame. Sorry it happened to you and that there seems to be no recourse.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

keep us posted if youtube makes any attempt to review this and rectify it please.

tim333 5y ago

Not much response from Google or anyone there. I wonder what became of "don't be evil"?

foxfluff 5y ago
I lost my email account to automatic suspension roughly a decade ago. I think they've been evil for a very long time now.

temp8964 5y ago

I am confused. Don't you have to create your own videos first and then upload them to YouTube? Or is that a common practice that for people to delete their local copy of videos after they upload to YouTube? I am defenitely not blaming the person in any way. I just don't understand this behavior after have seen this for several times. Why wouldn't you keep your local copy? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

bootloop 5y ago
Some (big) creators store all related material and the videos themselves. Others get rid of everything once the video is finished and uploaded. Edit: Of all my YT videos I wouldn't know where I have the sources stored although I never deliberately deleted them.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Is this because video files are very large and store them will be very expensive? I honestly have no idea how large they are, but I would be surprised if it will become a significant portion of the cost of a serious business.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    They can be pretty large. I see point of not storing raw footage, but finished videos after encoding is surely something to keep. Just for in future to upload to other services.. At least if you run actually profitable business.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dynamohk 5y ago

Not great from google, but you need a basic bcp/dr plan for common scenarios especially if service provider goes down for whatever reason.

JodieBenitez 5y ago

The cloud... it's just someone else's computer.

realitysballs 5y ago

This needs greater publicity to shame google/YouTube . I feel the pain here!

gzer0 5y ago

This is extremely concerning, frightening and downright alarming behavior by Google. This was the final straw for me to move off of Gmail, and anything google related. Currently in the process of migrating over 500,000 emails, a small-ish YouTube channel locally backed up, and anything else I can think of. I hope you get your items back. This is absurd. Simply absurd.

qmarchi 5y ago

Heyo, First off, sorry to hear that this has happened to you. It's never the for tools to be abused like this and for support be to be so unreachable. I've gone ahead and sent you an email so I can get some details and we can work to recover at least some of the content. Q. Disc: Googler, but I don't work in YouTube.

exikyut 5y ago
:) I hope OP got in touch. Thanks for doing the thing. Reading the thread made me think of a curious idea. It's got a couple layers of nuance, but could ultimately be really cool. In short: have a proactively-updated list somewhere that shows the presentation and content of every single email that will be sent before someone is due to lose access to a given service or their whole account. For example this could look like a (perhaps loosely-interconnected) web of support.google URLs with content like "you might receive an email like the following" <insert HTML extract/embed or screenshot of exactly what the email looks like here> "and you can do" <insert brick wall here :)>. If this were a reliable resource that stuck around, I could totally see a community-maintained tool emerging that would monitor for these sorts of emails then eg send emergency SMS/notifications/etc so that carefully-coordinated action could be undertaken immediately by competent users. These notifications could be sent to a tech-savvy family member or associate/colleague, who likely would not otherwise have access to the account in question. This person could then gain impromptu access (perhaps via remote access) and take immediate action such as generating takeouts (and perhaps sharding them to raise the chances they complete in time), individully downloading or screenshotting critical info, and firing out bulk alerts reminding of alternate contact info. Basically disaster-handling to try to end-cap workflow disruption while the mess (hOpEfUlLy) gets fixed. I can't help but think there's probably a disconcertingly large proportion of grandmas and effectively-illiterate users being caught in situations where they have very literally no idea how to proceed (eg, none of their Facebook friends are going to have a clue). It would seem there is enough awareness and reactivity localized around HN to make a difference to that 99th percentile, if harnessed in a constructive and non-disruptive way. It's a nuanced idea, but I'm reminded of the old YouTube story where optimizing the homepage made the site seem to load slower because it became viewable by a large demographic of people using sub-2G connections. Here, I can certainly see a temporary uptick in apparent legitimate account closures as the true false positive gap is surfaced, and that might translate to a bit of a suboptimal reputation hit. But in the ideal case, the new feedback would be integrated quickly, that transient spike would soon be forgotten, and in the long term, integrating the new data would help to further micro-optimize the performance of the 99th percentiles involved with the ML analytics processes in ways that exceed expectations. I'm thinking of the bigger-bigger picture; I understand it's simply impossible for Google to provide tier-one support to every single one of their four billion+ free users. This approach could implement an unorthodox workaround that lets motivated individuals contribute toward closing the loop of false positives. Currently it is effectively impossible for Google's userbase to take charge of this particular edge case. I am sure the number of people who would be very happy to take preventative action against false positives completely outweighs (perhaps by an order of magnitude) those who posture and rage and make themselves look stupid in the forums when things don't go their way. Knowing what all (or almost all) warning emails look like ahead of time is the only way a significant dent could be made in the false positive statistics; there's nothing stopping a detection project from getting off the ground today, but the lists of what content patterns to look for would have to be forged in blood by users who've had their accounts shut down, with this status quo compounded every time the wording of the warning emails changes. The one caveat emptor I can think of is that there is of course no way to prevent malicious users from taking advantage of a community initiative that enables a heightened baseline of proactivity, especially if it goes viral and is easy to use. But I'm honestly curious... how might this be the end of the world? The worst the malicious users can do is download their data, which a) they probably have a copy of anyway, and if they don't, b) wouldn't be a great look in legal cases where a defense can say "here is evidence ABC used XYZ software to monitor their account for shutdown, which is why shortly after *point* this email was sent they *point* submitted a takeout request 5 minutes later." I can definitely see some legal/regulatory/policy hesitancy (sigh), but (from my position as a relatively naive random internet user) I'm hopeful that hesitancy would mostly be without precedential substance, and this could actually viably happen with a bit of gruntwork and convincing.

ishanr 5y ago

That's why I created https://megatorium.com/ https://megatorium.com/ YouTube is too random and uncontrollable.

mysterydip 5y ago

How did she create the videos in the first place? Are the original videos used to upload to youtube accessible or archived somewhere?

quickthrower2 5y ago

I wonder if Google Takeout would have the content? Definitely try that. Also try a GDPR request. Not sure if that will work but that might get you a backup copy if they have it. If people have watched the videos recently there might be some local cache on their computers you can grab.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

powera 5y ago

As the saying goes, if you're not paying, you are the product. There are so many ways that "a few hundred internal training videos" could violate YouTube policy I'm just going to assume you were violating policy and didn't know it. In other words, the "always have a back-up of anything important you store in a free Google account" people are 100% correct.

slyall 5y ago

Happens with other companies too. My partner currently has their twitter account locked for "evading a ban". The thing is it is their main account, under their own name, used regularly to post non-controversial stuff (and their other accounts(not locked) are even more boring). No indication of what ban they are trying to avoid even. Their only weird thing they are doing is using VPNs sometimes. They have filed an appeal but it has been a week and no feedback of any kind.

batch12 5y ago
Sounds to me like a VPN IP was associated with a different banned account and the reuse of that IP by your partner associated your partner's account with the banned one.

wizardofmysore 5y ago

Depending on how valuable the videos are, you might consider sending a legal notice to Google.

datavirtue 5y ago

The videos were only stored on YouYube???

gurumeditations 5y ago

I agree with others that users need a technology bill of rights. We also need heavy handed breakup of the tech giants into their constituent parts so that more competition will make smaller businesses fight over how well they can treat people instead of how big they can grow.

devwastaken 5y ago

Had something similar happen years ago. 3x bogus copyright strikes and the entire channel was removed. Can't appeal. Even big content creators get bogus strikes, but they have representatives or something that dispute it with YouTube. Don't use YouTube for anything important.

oezi 5y ago
Why can't you appeal? Did you get a lawyer?
- devwastaken 5y ago
  The cost of a lawyer is far too high. When you appeal you are legally saying that their dmca is false. Typically by this time the company will back off, or, they won't, and now your only choice is to persue it in civil court and prove their dmca was false. Or, the company can even come after you for falsely saying that their dmca was false. It's not worth it. It's like civil asset forfeiture. The cost of getting back what was illigally seized is higher than the worth of it. In both time and money.

jb3689 5y ago

I used to work for a cloud backup company. People thought it was strange to backup services like Google Drive and Gmail. Posts like this make me second think that

spoonjim 5y ago

One very important thing for everyone to remember is to NOT USE ANY GOOGLE SERVICES BESIDES YOUTUBE. If you get banned from Google for something on your Google Drive, and lose your YouTube account, there's no alternative YouTube. You're fucked. But if you lose your ProtonMail account there are plenty of other email vendors, you'll be fine. STICK TO YOUTUBE ONLY.

newscracker 5y ago

OP, I can’t help except upvote the post for visibility. But if or when you get those videos, I hope you’d move to a platform that works for its customers (who are the users). In the case of YouTube, your wife was not the customer. Continuing to support such abusive platforms once any rogue bot activity is controlled would be harmful. Edit: I just read one of the OP’s comments about backups not being there and how that should’ve been planned. Please disregard the below paragraph, OP. I’m still leaving it around for others. Also, please always have backups of videos uploaded anywhere for sharing. I get that this may be irritating to read right now, but data that’s not stored on one’s hardware cannot be trusted to be around for long.

gverrilla 5y ago

I feel bad for introducing google to so many people in the old days. Hard scam

cdelsolar 5y ago

Google is the fucking worst. A few years ago I uploaded a bunch of music to Google Music, rather than carrying it around with me through different computers and backups. This was a bunch of priceless stuff -- mp3s from tiny bands (some of whom I personally knew) that cannot be gotten anywhere anymore, recordings of my own bands in college, etc. Of course I deleted them from my devices, and then a few weeks ago I want to listen to one of the songs, and it turns out they're all gone forever. Google Music discontinued a while ago. How do I get these songs back? I literally have zero recourse.

Zathman 5y ago
Over a year ago Google Music sent out notices that users can download or migrate their uploaded media to YouTube Music via https://music.youtube.com/transfer https://music.youtube.com/transfer. There really wasn't a shortage of notices and blog posts across a wide variety of media outlets instructing people to migrate and warning when Google Music was shutting down.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  I got those notices and in my case it was "only" dozens of CDs I backed up. I was so frustrated and disgusted that I had taken time to back them up to Google Music that I just let them go. I still have the CDs, hopefully they are still in good enough condition to be backed up again.
  - Zathman 5y ago
    YouTube Music was really rough in the beginning, and while I still have some UI nitpicks, I've come to find its radio algorithm to be much superior than Google Music's ever was for finding enjoyably obscure tracks. The tracks I uploaded to Google Music and transferred to YouTube Music are still playable through YouTube Music and downloadable from Google Takeout. If you migrated your library to YouTube Music, you may yet be able to download them from https://takeout.google.com https://takeout.google.com (YouTube and YouTube Music).

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

You delegated the only and original copies of the works to a cloud entity? This wasn't YouTube's fault. It was your company's. Let this be a lesson to you and start making offline, offsite backups of your work. Today it was YouTube, tomorrow it could be ransomware. Be glad it was only some videos.

S_A_P 5y ago

YouTube deleted my account a few months ago. The reason was totally unfounded and I had no recourse. I’m pretty certain some AI flagged my account and instead of a sensible approach like 1) notify the user that something they did was flagged. 2) point to the instance where the supposed bad behavior happened and allow review/context by humans 3) see that my YouTube account was 12-13 years old and had only a handful of personal videos and 1-2 public videos and that I have a long history of not behaving badly Instead I got a flippant response to my query as to why it was deleted and I quote: “Yeah I’m going to go ahead and deny your claim”. As far as I’m concerned the less Google I have in my life from now on the better. While I don’t think that the other options are much better, this incident has changed me from having not much of an opinion on Google to having a pretty seething dislike for them.

waffle_maniac 5y ago
Infuriating. I know it’s a private company but the internet feels much less free recently. The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup and slideshows. So basically stuff that is backed up elsewhere. I want more decentralized solutions. The problem is that they are costly.
- vel0city 5y ago
  > The reason I’m using YT is for private video backup I hope this thread has really shown you why this isn't a good idea. YouTube is video distribution not archive.
Tozen 5y ago
The arrogance and abusiveness of Google/YouTube is that they don't see any competition nor have fear of legal actions against them by "lowly" "nobody" users. More people have to choose alternatives to the point that Google/YouTube management will notice and be concerned about.

kc10 5y ago

This is extremely concerning. I have several of my daughter's childhood videos on YT as private videos and several hundreds of GBs of pictures in Google photos. And I literally don't have any backup for all this content. I previously used external drives, but I moved them to the cloud so they are easily accessible and not have the risk of hardware failures. I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff.

root_axis 5y ago
> I guess not a good idea to just rely on cloud providers for important stuff Certainly not, but if you're going to rely on cloud providers at all, definitely don't rely on ones that you aren't paying since they have no obligation to ensure your data stays online. If you're paying for your hosting you have established a legal contract that protects you from capricious access loss like the one described in the OP.
pvaldes 5y ago
Do a google takeout. Now. Is good for you and is good for Google not having to bear the unique responsibility over your memories. Win-win.
Too 5y ago
Use the 321 rule. 3 backups, 2 different media, 1 of them off site. You should keep your external drive backups. “Cloud” gives you the off site, but by itself from the point of a user it is just 1 media and 1 backup. Even if they likely have a lot more internally.

pmarreck 5y ago

Don't leave your only copy of your work with a company that is so big that finding human tech-support would be nearly impossible

eqtn 5y ago

if you are in India, as a last resort you should file a complaint with consumer court and see what happens.

nojvek 5y ago

This is kind of dumb. At-least YouTube should have a form of downloading archived videos if the account is deactivated. They probably have them on their servers anyway. Some of this makes me feel like there should be some form of law. If you ban/delete someone’s account, and the data they had was not illegal .e.g child porn, you gotta hand it over.

WalterBright 5y ago

Let's face it. If you use a cloud service for any critical business service, such as processing payments, or data storage, you're liable to get "turned off" for any random reason by an algorithm. You have no recourse whatsoever. Have your own personal backups of all your valuable data, emails, videos, pictures, etc. As I learned from expensive experience, if you use a cloud payment processor, have it set up with at least two distinct companies. Yeah, I got turned off by an algorithm on one. Their support sent me pathetically worthless AI generated emails. After a couple months, I got it turned back on finally because I personally knew someone at the company. Obviously, this is not a general solution. Always have a backup service plan at another company.

dkd903 5y ago

hnshit2 5y ago

gbraad 5y ago

Never rely on an online services to be a safe/backup location to store your files. If they are important to you. Keep them somewhere else too

causality0 5y ago

speculates that google cleans out low hanging fruit, using metrics, and there was nothing in the content that triggered the bot at all Why speculate? Ask your wife if she uses copyrighted content in her videos. Her response should tell you if she was flagged by an automated content-ID system. All else aside, this is a lesson in never having only one copy of anything remotely important.

Animats 5y ago

"The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

honkycat 5y ago

Google will kill your entire business via AI filtering and refuse to even acknowledge you exist while you lose your home and life after investing in and building their platforms.

sireat 5y ago

This is extremely concerning. I also have over 500 unlisted training videos - seen by average of 10-30 people each. Most are boring IntelliJ or VS Code screencasts. However some contain small outtakes from other Youtube videos - this could potentially trigger a strike. SSD holding originals died without warning. Time to download everything and invest into archive grade Blu-ray or LTO tapes.

unosama 5y ago
You can also mirror them to other video services... One of the new ones will do it for you automatically. Odysee.com I believe.

vero2 5y ago

> Youtube sent her 3 strikes in one week. On videos that were 4 years old, indicating cyber bullying. Do you know by chance if anyone "internal employees" tried to complain and report? I suspect this is an insider issue. may be some internal staff, downloaded everything and reported these videos to kill your wife's business and to start their own business.

pvaldes 5y ago

Can we ask for the name of the channel?

IshKebab 5y ago

If she's in Europe maybe a GDPR personal data request? Long shot.

mro_name 5y ago

> This content was incredibly time intensive to create why did she trash the origins? And please, do indieweb.org/POSSE - look at PeerTube and maybe distribute copies via YT but never exclusively or even rely on them as an archive. Please.

unosama 5y ago
What is indieweb.net? The link is just squatted for me
- mro_name 5y ago
  Thx, stupid me, it's indieweb.org/POSSE. Fixed above, too.

alangibson 5y ago

A bit late, but I started burning important media to MDISCs then giving them to friends that swing by. I ask them to toss them in the top of their closet and forget about them. Makes multiple redundant backups cheap and easy.

samoit 5y ago

Lessons to learn here, Do not base your work on 3ºparties, always do backups of your videos/work. The easiest way it is not the safest one...

vermorel 5y ago

It might be too late, but for others, PeerTube, open source replacement of YouTube, is the solution. Longer discussion https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-replace-youtube.html https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-repl...

elcomet 5y ago
I don't see how this is a solution. Either you host it on a public instance and the admin can delete your videos as well, or you host it yourself, but it requires technical abilities and lots of money.

tveyben 5y ago

No backup and ‘all the eggs in one basket’. Seems to me like a high risk to take. ‘Backup being too expensive’ surely there can’t be that many videos (a $business$ should be able to afford a few ~10TB usb disks for a few hundred $/€). I have no trust in services like YT (where I am the product) so I host my own data on my own server and roll my own backups - on/off-site - (thus have only myself to blame if it goes bad). I have actually been thinking if I should yt-dl the good videos I have found on YT for exactly the incident you have been exposed to! I really feel for your loss - and really hope that a human contact will be made so the content can be retrieved. Hopefully HN attention might help! It’s a sad world where so-called AI makes the decisions and it’s almost impossible to get in touch with a real live human being. I fear for the future (your experience being a good example of how bad it can go). Just think about when those methodologies get applied to the legal-system or health-system. ‘Appeal - not possible the AI knows better and have decided…’ Hmm - I think I read it already started in the police-domain with face-detection…

throwawayffffas 5y ago

That is a rather unfortunate position to be in. My 2 cents this is important enough you shouldn't have to keep playing around with their UI and support. Get a lawyer to speak to their lawyers about your data, that way at least you are gonna get a respectful answer even though the answer might be we deleted the videos and you can never get it back.

sinuhe69 5y ago

How long is the average video? 1-2 hours? Then I think the average size of the videos will be 1-2 GB for FHD solution with h.264 compression; maybe double the size for fast compression. But even so, 700+ videos will require a few TB of storage only. You can buy some 1-2 TB mobile HDD to store them offline, just in case. It’s nothing fancy but very easy to handle, cheap and works in most cases. Most people store their photos in this way, if I’m not mistaken.

husamia 5y ago

I remember getting an email that unlisted videos will be removed.

ecesena 5y ago

Have you tried requesting google/youtube all your (her) data? If the videos aren’t there you can almost certainly proceed with a lawyer since you know they should be there (and almost certainly they’re not permanently deleted).

notananthem 5y ago

Why would you use a free service for any work things ever

aabbcc1241 5y ago

Using IPFS to distribute videos may prevent lost in this situation. You got backup and p2p distribution at the same time.

xtat 5y ago

Another one. How many stories like this never make it to the front page?

Tozen 5y ago

Sad situation, and hindsight is always 20/20 with such. Probably would have been good to have also uploaded videos to other similar sites/alternatives like Dailymotion, DTube, etc... In addition to the free/cheap cloud storage options or buying external HDDs. Google/YouTube will continue to ignore, abuse, and gaslight when they think there isn't any competition and can get away with it.